If you liked the Bush v. Gore post-election fiasco of 2000---hanging chads, endless recounts, dueling lawsuits---you may be happy to know we could see it again this year. All of the advances in voting and election technology in the past 20 years aimed at preventing that scenario could be wiped out in an all mail-in election this year. Democrats and liberal groups are pushing for everyone to vote by mail due to the coronavirus pandemic, setting up a legal battle in Texas and paving the way for possible chaos this fall.
President Trump, Texas leaders and many Republicans argue that expanding mail-in voting to everyone is a recipe for mass voter fraud and would undermine confidence in elections. "We need absentee ballots for people who are physically disabled or sick, or who can't make it to the polls," says Hans Von Spakovsky with the Heritage Foundation. "But all mail-in elections are not a good idea."
In a recent interview with C-SPAN, Von Spakovsky explains why all mail-in elections would be rife with problems. "In prior federal elections, millions of absentee ballots have been misdirected...in other words, they were mailed to the wrong address," he says. "Also, there are literally millions of ballots that the state authorities don't know what happened to them...they put them in the mail when voters requested them, and they never saw them again."
Democrats have been pushing for expanded mail-in voting for years, raising suspicions that they're taking advantage of the pandemic to rush this through in time for the presidential election. "There's no reason at this point to switch to having an all mail-in election in November, given we don't really know what the health conditions will even be like at that time," says Von Spakovsky. "And frankly, like a lot of people, I doubt we're all still going to be at home and still not back in school in November."